urge parliamentary scrutiny of the state within a state of the Khakis, especially the dreaded spy agency (DGFI). The interference of the Khakis into state politics will once again jeopardize institutionalization of elective democracy, good governance and secularism. The rogues fear social justice activists, critics, politicians and journalists too - Joy Manush!

Monday, February 25, 2013

The last Facebook update that Ahmed Rajib Haider posted was
on February 15. Not too long after he had uploaded this post, his hacked body
was discovered around 9.30pm in
front of the house where he lived with his brother in the Mirpur area of Dhaka.

The 30-year-old architect hadan
online persona of Thaba Baba (loosely translated as ‘Paw Daddy’, which he wrote
as ‘Claw’ in English as an explanation).

His blogs on the
popular Amarblog site regularly and primarily dealt with the menace of rising
Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh.

Haider, one of the
main organisers of the anti-Jamaat demonstrations at Dhaka’s Shahbagh square,
was uninhibited about his distaste towards the Jamaat-e-Islami.

He had also proudly
declared himself to be an atheist, something that the Jamaat has subsequently
used to brand every ‘blogger’ demanding its ban as being ‘un-Islamic’ and
therefore morally degenerate.

While his murderer(s)
are yet to be found, most Bangladeshis believe Haider’s untimely death to be
the handiwork of the Jamaat-Shibir, the lumpen youth wing of the Jamaat.

In a way, it’s rather
apt that in his final Facebook post, Haider had posted the link of a news story
from the Bengali daily Kaaler Kantha that detailed the massive network of
assets and business interests under the Jamaat’s control.

In his comments above
the link, he had strongly recommended the boycott of Jamaat-linked
establishments — from banks and educational establishments to hospitals and
media companies — adding that there should be a proper set of guidelines to
identify Jamaat fronts since a simple transfer of shares could suggest new
ownership of a company.

This had not been the
first attack on an online activist in Bangladesh. Only a month before,
Asif Mohiuddin, another openly atheist blogger, was stabbed by suspected
Islamists. Fortunately, he survived.

In the case of Haider,
authorities and fellow bloggers point to the death threats he had received from
a pro-Jamaat blog, Sonar Bangla.

If Pakistan was horrified by the
brutal attack on 14-year-old blogger Malala Yousafzai by the Taliban in October
last year, Haider’s murder has enraged secular Bangladesh and split the nation
into two.

Facebook friends

Inside the compound of Dhaka Art College, Asif Saleh, blogger-tweeter and
senior director at the development organisation BRAC (formerly, Bangladesh
Rural Advancement Committee), sips on his tea and explains how the popular
movement against Islamist politics has been intimately connected to the
successful ‘Digitial Bangladesh’ drive that has been aggressively pushing for
the use of digital technology to spread education, poverty alleviation, health
as well as democracy and human rights.

“The youth in Bangladesh was not politically
sensitised. They were apathetic towards what was going on in the country,” says
Saleh.

“With the arrival of
social media platforms, ‘being political’ became cool. Young Bangladeshis have
now suddenly found out that their actions do matter, their actions can lead to
change,” says Saleh.

On the first day of
the Shahbagh demonstrations on February 5, there were about 500 people who had
gathered to protest against the life sentence, as opposed to a sentence of
death, handed by the international war tribunal to Jamaat leader and accused
1971 war criminal Abdul Qader Mollah.

This core group had
connected and vented online, and had decided their plan of action on Facebook.

The protests of this
initial small gathering was picked up by the media, which in turn fed the news
on the internet for others to join in. The media – social as well as mainstream
–became force-multipliers for the movement.

“It’s been a
year since the advent of 24-hour news channels. The 24-hour format has to fill
news round the clock. It was fortuitous that the Shahbagh protests filled much
of news TV.

Suddenly you also saw
the white-haired pundits, the usual suspects on political discussions, being
joined by youngsters airing their views,” says Saleh, a computer technology
graduate who came back from the United States leaving a Goldman Sachs job five
years ago.

But at the core of the
Shahbagh revolution lies Bangladesh’s internet
revolution. Over the last three years, the cost of online communication has
nosedived.

In 2009, a megabyte of
information would set the consumer back by 27,000 takas. Today, a megabyte
costs 5,000 takas.

Thanks to affordability,
by November 2011, there were 9 million users with an internet connection in a
country of 142 million people. The figures go up if one considers the many more
mobile phone users.

Tech has no ideology

But here’s the flip side. The resources-rich Jamaat is disproportionately
stronger online than offline.

Technology being
ideologically neutral, the same social media platforms and penetrative
telephony are tools for the enemies of the Shahbagh activists.

It is in the terrain
where the online seeps into the offline and then feeds the online again that a
new kind of war of propaganda is being fought.

Knowing that the
Jamaat has already started to successfully conflate the idea of ‘blogger’ with
‘atheist’, the Awami League government has ‘cracked down’ on internet sites,
removing blog posts that are deemed to be “spreading hatred, provoking social
disorder and hurting religious sentiments of the people”.

Last week, information
minister Hasanal Haque Inu urged the media “not to publish any indecent remark
against Islam, the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad”.

The government had
swiftly blocked YouTube after an allegedly blasphemous film on the prophet was
“shown there”.

These are measures
that were taken by the government to ‘protect’ secular bloggers from the
violent reactive politics of the Islamists — and not give a handle to the
opposition BNP-Jamaat to accuse the government of being
anti-Islamic.

But here’s the paradox:
it was through social media that those demanding Bangladesh remain secular found
their voices heard, voices that would ultimately reverberate through Shahbagh
and Bangladesh.

To get that volume
knob turned down as a precaution would be exactly what the Islamists want. To
make the people disinterested again.